Backcountry skier caught, injured in avalanche near Marble

A backcountry skier was caught in a human-triggered avalanche and injured on Saturday afternoon near Marble, just outside Pitkin County to the south in the Crystal River Valley, according to a recent report from the Colorado Avalanche Information Center.

“He sustained pretty severe injuries from the avalanche and was airlifted to Aspen Valley Hospital,” said Brian Lazar, CAIC deputy director and its central mountains regional manager.

Two backcountry skiers triggered a size D2 avalanche off Raspberry Ridge on the lower portion of a run locally called Money Shot — a steep, northeast-facing slope, Lazar said. It broke a few hundred feet wide and ran several hundred vertical feet.

On a scale between 1 and 5, D1 avalanches are harmless, D2 avalanches can injure or kill people, D3 avalanches can destroy a house or car, D4 avalanches can destroy buildings or mature forests, and D5 avalanches can gouge the landscape, according to Avalanche.org, which is a partnership between the American Avalanche Association and the US Forest Service National Avalanche Center.

This D2 avalanche caught one skier and pushed him into a tree, where he suffered injuries, which prohibited him from self-evacuation, Lazar said. The skier’s partner was not involved in the avalanche and was OK.

“His partner was below him, so he had to go climb up to him to help him get out … (the skier) was partially buried; his head was above the snow,” he said.

Just the day prior on Friday, according to CAIC, two snowboarders were caught in an avalanche in a steep, northeast-facing slope near treeline in Yule Creek, just outside Marble.

The overall avalanche activity across Colorado has been very active recently, Lazar said. Some of these avalanches were occurring on fairly steep terrain, including the one this past weekend in Marble.

“Since March 6, we’ve had 40-human triggered avalanches with eight people caught,” he said. “That’s a really active few days, for sure.”

He added that a lot of these avalanches were releasing storm snow, breaking on weak layers that were previously buried. While most of these avalanches were fairly small, most of them involved storm snow.

“We had a small, weak layer on the surface prior to March 3, and then we buried that weak layer starting on the 3^rd,” he said. “We accumulated enough new snow and wind-drifted snow to create cohesive slabs above those weak layers. And that’s what people are mostly triggering.”

Jonathan Bowers is the assistant editor and copy editor for The Aspen Times. He can be reached at jbowers@aspentimes.com.